Law school isn’t the only route to becoming a lawyer. In states that allow it, a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of people who take state bar exams were trained as apprentices, with no other legal education. It’s a difficult approach, the bar exam failure rate is high, but the costs are low.

Should such a do-it-yourself approach, with the help of lawyers as mentors, be more widely used to avoid excessive debt and create different perspectives on the law?

Erwin Chemerinsky (Dean, UC-Irvine), Going to Law School Is More Important Than Ever: "Although law schools have been subjected to criticism in recent years, some quite deserved, the reality is that they do an excellent job teaching basic skills that all lawyers need to know."

Brian Z. Tamanaha (Washington University), A Combination Apprenticeship and Law School: "One year of law school, followed by an apprenticeship set up by the state bar association would make a law degree financially viable."